Hands Off the Consumer Finance Bureau

Some congressional Republicans are calling on President Trump to summarily fire Richard Cordray, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Their push to remove Mr. Cordray, whose term runs until July 2018, is the latest of many attempts to weaken the bureau, which date back to its creation in 2010 under the Dodd-Frank financial reform law.

This time around, however, Republican foes of the bureau are assuming they have a willing ally in the White House. While Mr. Trump has not fully disabused them of that notion, he has sent them a “not so fast” signal: Last week, his press secretary, Sean Spicer, told reporters that “no decision has been made at this time” about Mr. Cordray’s position.

Mr. Trump would be smart to go against lawmakers and let Mr. Cordray serve out his term. That would be the right thing to do and consistent with his campaign promises to defend Americans against a system he says has “robbed our working class.”

The consumer bureau is the only federal agency with the sole mission of looking out for the interests of ordinary Americans in their dealings with banks and other lenders. Its investigations and enforcement actions have yielded fines and settlements that have returned nearly $12 billion to millions of Americans in the past five years — money that otherwise would have enriched lenders through high and hidden fees on bank accounts and credit cards, predatory mortgages, deceptive terms in student loans, illegal debt collection from military service members and unfair auto loans.

The bureau’s success and growing public support have only inflamed the wrath of Republicans. They never wanted a bureau, in part because abusive lending is lucrative for the owners and executives of financial firms they rely on for campaign donations. The more effective the bureau has proved to be, the more overheated its critics are. They now refer to the agency as tyrannical, even labeling the director “King Richard” and calling for his firing in the name of defending democracy.

In prevailing upon Mr. Trump to do the deed, Republicans cite a recent ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that changed a part of the law that created the agency. The law said that the president can fire the bureau’s director only for cause, a protection that is intended to insulate independent agencies from political interference. Similar protection is in place at the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the Federal Reserve, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Office of Special Counsel, the Social Security Administration and several other agencies.

But in the case of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a three-judge panel ruled 2 to 1 that limiting the president’s power to remove the director made the position too powerful and thus breached the constitutional separation-of-powers doctrine. As a remedy, the judges ruled that the director must be removable at the president’s will.

That remedy, however, will only take effect if the ruling is upheld by the full Court of Appeals or if the full court declines the bureau’s petition for a rehearing. If Mr. Trump were to fire Mr. Cordray now before the full court acted, the move would be needlessly antagonistic, probably illegal and likely to end up in the courts if Mr. Cordray challenged his removal.

Even if the ruling were upheld, Mr. Trump would do well to let Mr. Cordray finish his term. After all, he has done a very good job protecting ordinary people from the powerful elites Mr. Trump spent much of his campaign raging against.